Terence Bennett - November 14, 2016We had over 70 attendees at our Meetup in Boston! We piggybacked off of the wonderful APIStrat conference as their official meetup and partnered with APICraft Boston to put on an after hours event. For speakers, we had our Community and Developer Relations manager Alex Bowen talk about Reusable APIs, Mike Stowe from MuleSoft talked about Microservices, and the API Evangelist himself Kin Lane, had a fireside chat.
A packed room at Hill Holliday!
Some of the highlights of the meetup is when MuleSoft’s Mike Stowe compared APIs to Lego and Kin Lane spurred some great conversation around how the 21st century version of home ec or health class is (or should be) digital literacy, amongst other things.
In Alex’s talk, she highlighted the complexity and problem with the manual creation of APIs in software development, and how DreamFactory solves this through an API Automation Approach. As one of DreamFactory’s community leaders, she also offered a rundown of the DreamFactory community and free resources folks can use. She can be found regularly on our community forum and is available to chat or answer your questions!
Alex Bowen giving her talk.
The API Automation Approach basically says that creating APIs manually for each new project and application slows you down a lot. You need to think about how you can use an API for more than one application, and maybe even hundreds and sometimes even thousands of applications, seen especially in enterprise cases.
This approach in contrast to the manual approach is quite different, but to get the key idea is that it’s all about reusable APIs. Reusability speeds you up dramatically.
API Automation Approach.
Instead of more than half of your time on back end integration, it frees up a ton of time to focus on user experience and the actual thing your building and not the plumbing under the hood.
It also lets you decouple your client side from your server side so it mitigates that interface negotiation, it lets you hook up to really any backend infrastructure so it’s portable in the sense you can use different databases very easily. This decoupling effect lets you write the same application, that will work the same with any backend database or infrastructure.
A byproduct of API Automation is that you get great, scalable systems that are reliable, portable and highly secure.
We’ve got tons of resources on this idea of API Automation, so feel free to poke around, or get in touch to see how we can help!
See the rest of the photos from the Meetup here. We hope to see you at our next event!
Terence Bennett, CEO of DreamFactory, has a wealth of experience in government IT systems and Google Cloud. His impressive background includes being a former U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer and a former member of Google’s Red Team. Prior to becoming CEO, he served as COO at DreamFactory Software.